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Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955
Institution and Passivity is based on course notes for classes taught at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris. Philosophically, this collection connects the issue of passive constitution of meaning with the dimension of history, furthering discussions and completing arguments started in The Visible and the Invisible and Signs. Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey’s translation makes available to an English-speaking readership a critical transitional text in the history of phenomenology.
- GenresPsychoanalysisTheory
310 pages, Paperback
First published January 20, 2003
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About the author
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
124 books619 followersFrench phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world. Like the other major phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty expressed his philosophical insights in writings on art, literature, and politics; however Merleau-Ponty was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the Twentieth Century to engage extensively with the sciences, and especially with descriptive psychology. Because of this engagement, his writings have become influential with the recent project of naturalizing phenomenology in which phenomenologists utilize the results of psychology and cognitive science.
Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime. His father was killed in World War 1 when Merleau-Ponty was 3. After secondary schooling at the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty became a student at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied alongside Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930.
Merleau-Ponty first taught at Chartres, then became a tutor at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was awarded his doctorate on the basis of two important books: La structure du comportement (1942) and Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945).
After teaching at the University of Lyon from 1945 to 1948, Merleau-Ponty lectured on child psychology and education at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952. He was awarded the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France from 1952 until his death in 1961, making him the youngest person to have been elected to a Chair.
Besides his teaching, Merleau-Ponty was also political editor for Les Temps Modernes from the founding of the journal in October 1945 until December 1952.
Aged 53, he died suddenly of a stroke in 1961, apparently while preparing for a class on Descartes. He was buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime. His father was killed in World War 1 when Merleau-Ponty was 3. After secondary schooling at the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty became a student at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied alongside Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930.
Merleau-Ponty first taught at Chartres, then became a tutor at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was awarded his doctorate on the basis of two important books: La structure du comportement (1942) and Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945).
After teaching at the University of Lyon from 1945 to 1948, Merleau-Ponty lectured on child psychology and education at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952. He was awarded the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France from 1952 until his death in 1961, making him the youngest person to have been elected to a Chair.
Besides his teaching, Merleau-Ponty was also political editor for Les Temps Modernes from the founding of the journal in October 1945 until December 1952.
Aged 53, he died suddenly of a stroke in 1961, apparently while preparing for a class on Descartes. He was buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 12, 2024
Some interesting thoughts on the unconscious and its implications for M-P's shift from a phenomenology of perception to an ontology of expression. "Institution" gradually comes to replace the "perceptual consciousness" of Phenomenology of Perception--a notion which was still too wedded to the Cartesian trappings of transcendental phenomenology. To understand 'consciousness' as institution is to reject the language of consciousness and unconsciousness altogether, to return to the grain of life as it is lived before we conceptualize it (even though, yes, institution is itself a concept, one drawn from Husserl) and break its lived unity apart into antinomies.
Instead of conceiving of the unconscious as a "second mind" "behind" or "beneath" consciousness, MP identifies two poles of the perceptual field: the figure and the background. The Gestalt's structure prevents us from bringing both poles into focus simultaneously. One is always clarified at the expense of the other. The sectors of the perceptual field which are more clearly delineated are fringed by nested halos of increasing ambiguity. "Consciousness" is the process whereby a sector of the perceptual field becomes increasingly differentiated and delineated, and "unconsciousness" is the process whereby the perceptual field becomes increasingly de-differentiated. Our "existential field" moves somewhere between the two poles in daily life. If we are never entirely conscious of what we are doing, neither are we entirely unconscious. Likewise, "normal" waking life includes dreamlike, imaginary, fantastical, and hallucinatory phenomena, and our dreams are born from our contact with the real world. Consciousness and unconsciousness are intermingled and inseparable because they are two polar aspects of the body schema's praxical processes of differentiation and de-differentiation. And the body schema is itself one aspect of the body-world nexus which M-P will later call "flesh." Its practical norms ("levels" and "axes") establish the unconscious "background" against which all perceptual phenomena appear as "variations," "divergences," or "differences" to form a diacritical affective sensorimotor field structure which naturally gives birth to the ideal structures of language and thought (since the perceptual field is always tending beyond itself). Perception is meaningful without yet being symbolic, and it tends towards the symbolic realm through the body's expressive perceptual gestures.
From the perspective of a practicing phenomenologist or a psychoanalyst--that is, a reflecting consciousness--the unconscious appears to be defined negatively, as a lack of consciousness. But this way of thinking about the unconscious is retroactive. It occurs after we have already experienced the "unconscious" as a field aspect of everyday life. To a reflecting consciousness, the unconscious is something like an absolute past, a "past that has never been present." But to a pre-reflective perceiving consciousness, the unconscious is "present" in the form of the "gaps," "ellipses," and "allusions" of the perceptual field's ambiguous background structures. When one thinks about the unconscious, one engages in a creative process of re-membering the perceptual field, which doesn't just preserve the pre-reflective perceptual meanings in an ideal form, but positively transforms them into something different (and yet, into something towards which they were already tending). Phenomenology's backwards-looking attempt to "return to the things themselves," and psychoanalysis' attempts to study the unconscious through the analysand's speech, are creative gestures which, insofar as they think and write about pre-reflective experience, never coincide with pre-reflective experience itself. From the standpoint of thought, pre-reflective experience can only be approached indirectly, which is why poetry, literature, and art may better "capture" the textures of pre-reflective experience than philosophy and science can. The other alternative, of course, would be to dive into pre-reflective experience and stop thinking. But then one would inevitably ride the swelling tides of pre-reflective experience into a creative expression that leads to reflective consciousness. It's in the unceasing movement between the two, the reference from one to the other--eye and mind, the visible and the invisible, consciousness and unconsciousness, perception and reflection--that M-P locates himself and the practice of phenomenology, and expression is the shuttle that weaves them together into a single fabric.
There's much more to write about Merleau-Ponty's reworking of Freud, and what happens to the unconscious when it's incorporated into the fabric of the body's perceptual field--but that would take a book. Suffice it to say that while jettisoning the notion of an absolute unconscious that would exist as something separated from conscious experience by a censor (something Freud himself rejected, this is clearly a response to Sartre), MP manages to retain Freud's dynamic logics of repression, substitution, condensation, displacement. He merely folds them into the transcendental passive constitutions (i.e., institutions) of the living body in its dialogue with the world. He lacks an adequate theory of drive, and breaks with Lacan's reading of the unconscious as composed of signifiers (since for MP the reference to the signifier, and its arbitrary relation with the signified, is already the mark of a Cartesian dualistic thought), instead insisting that the ambiguity of speech is instituted at the perceptual level, where one aspect of the perceptual field is connected in an associative-symbolic link with all of the others without the mediation of 'representations' (this is a derivation from Freud, who is working with a representational theory of mind)...
Instead of conceiving of the unconscious as a "second mind" "behind" or "beneath" consciousness, MP identifies two poles of the perceptual field: the figure and the background. The Gestalt's structure prevents us from bringing both poles into focus simultaneously. One is always clarified at the expense of the other. The sectors of the perceptual field which are more clearly delineated are fringed by nested halos of increasing ambiguity. "Consciousness" is the process whereby a sector of the perceptual field becomes increasingly differentiated and delineated, and "unconsciousness" is the process whereby the perceptual field becomes increasingly de-differentiated. Our "existential field" moves somewhere between the two poles in daily life. If we are never entirely conscious of what we are doing, neither are we entirely unconscious. Likewise, "normal" waking life includes dreamlike, imaginary, fantastical, and hallucinatory phenomena, and our dreams are born from our contact with the real world. Consciousness and unconsciousness are intermingled and inseparable because they are two polar aspects of the body schema's praxical processes of differentiation and de-differentiation. And the body schema is itself one aspect of the body-world nexus which M-P will later call "flesh." Its practical norms ("levels" and "axes") establish the unconscious "background" against which all perceptual phenomena appear as "variations," "divergences," or "differences" to form a diacritical affective sensorimotor field structure which naturally gives birth to the ideal structures of language and thought (since the perceptual field is always tending beyond itself). Perception is meaningful without yet being symbolic, and it tends towards the symbolic realm through the body's expressive perceptual gestures.
From the perspective of a practicing phenomenologist or a psychoanalyst--that is, a reflecting consciousness--the unconscious appears to be defined negatively, as a lack of consciousness. But this way of thinking about the unconscious is retroactive. It occurs after we have already experienced the "unconscious" as a field aspect of everyday life. To a reflecting consciousness, the unconscious is something like an absolute past, a "past that has never been present." But to a pre-reflective perceiving consciousness, the unconscious is "present" in the form of the "gaps," "ellipses," and "allusions" of the perceptual field's ambiguous background structures. When one thinks about the unconscious, one engages in a creative process of re-membering the perceptual field, which doesn't just preserve the pre-reflective perceptual meanings in an ideal form, but positively transforms them into something different (and yet, into something towards which they were already tending). Phenomenology's backwards-looking attempt to "return to the things themselves," and psychoanalysis' attempts to study the unconscious through the analysand's speech, are creative gestures which, insofar as they think and write about pre-reflective experience, never coincide with pre-reflective experience itself. From the standpoint of thought, pre-reflective experience can only be approached indirectly, which is why poetry, literature, and art may better "capture" the textures of pre-reflective experience than philosophy and science can. The other alternative, of course, would be to dive into pre-reflective experience and stop thinking. But then one would inevitably ride the swelling tides of pre-reflective experience into a creative expression that leads to reflective consciousness. It's in the unceasing movement between the two, the reference from one to the other--eye and mind, the visible and the invisible, consciousness and unconsciousness, perception and reflection--that M-P locates himself and the practice of phenomenology, and expression is the shuttle that weaves them together into a single fabric.
There's much more to write about Merleau-Ponty's reworking of Freud, and what happens to the unconscious when it's incorporated into the fabric of the body's perceptual field--but that would take a book. Suffice it to say that while jettisoning the notion of an absolute unconscious that would exist as something separated from conscious experience by a censor (something Freud himself rejected, this is clearly a response to Sartre), MP manages to retain Freud's dynamic logics of repression, substitution, condensation, displacement. He merely folds them into the transcendental passive constitutions (i.e., institutions) of the living body in its dialogue with the world. He lacks an adequate theory of drive, and breaks with Lacan's reading of the unconscious as composed of signifiers (since for MP the reference to the signifier, and its arbitrary relation with the signified, is already the mark of a Cartesian dualistic thought), instead insisting that the ambiguity of speech is instituted at the perceptual level, where one aspect of the perceptual field is connected in an associative-symbolic link with all of the others without the mediation of 'representations' (this is a derivation from Freud, who is working with a representational theory of mind)...
February 19, 2024
These lecture notes may be elucidating if you do research on Merleau-Ponty, but as a reading experience the book isn't that great. Also, I wonder how informative or necessary it was to include Merleau-Ponty's reading notes on Freud, for instance. Basically you have the ingredients of a book by Merleau-Ponty here, but a lot of the text is cryptic and the gaps remain unfilled. To be sure, the book has historical and documentary value, but yes, you have to be a great great fan of Merleau-Ponty's to actually read this from cover to cover.
August 9, 2017
As always, these lecture notes of Merleau-Ponty's are enigmatic and fascinating. It would have been great to be at the lectures and allow him to fill in the spaces and ellipses the notes leave, but at least we have the notes to show us his thoughts in development.
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November 25, 2022Comment:
Merleau-Ponty has always been interested in the 'unchosen', the unwilled. This book is about our inertia; the inner and outer aspects of same. Unfortunately the texts included are merely his class notes, so a great deal of connecting material is left out. What a book these notes -fleshed out- would have made! It was a calamity for modern philosophy that M-P died so young...
I need to review this; or perhaps his unfinished "Visible and Invisible"; which kindasorta has a similar focus...
More and more I find myself drawn to the late Heidegger, the later Merleau-Ponty, the postwar Kojeve and the postwar Carl Schmitt. Why? Because each walked away from his earlier 'political existentialism'. (Of course, this was different for each of them.) Instead, each (in their unique ways) became focused on what no one made or did. It is this turn towards inevitabilities, and away from choices, that continually makes me return to these four great thinkers towards the end of their career
Merleau-Ponty has always been interested in the 'unchosen', the unwilled. This book is about our inertia; the inner and outer aspects of same. Unfortunately the texts included are merely his class notes, so a great deal of connecting material is left out. What a book these notes -fleshed out- would have made! It was a calamity for modern philosophy that M-P died so young...
I need to review this; or perhaps his unfinished "Visible and Invisible"; which kindasorta has a similar focus...
More and more I find myself drawn to the late Heidegger, the later Merleau-Ponty, the postwar Kojeve and the postwar Carl Schmitt. Why? Because each walked away from his earlier 'political existentialism'. (Of course, this was different for each of them.) Instead, each (in their unique ways) became focused on what no one made or did. It is this turn towards inevitabilities, and away from choices, that continually makes me return to these four great thinkers towards the end of their career
December 30, 2020
Vooralsnog louter het gedeelte over Institution gelezen. Erg interessant, maar aangezien het collegeaantekeningen zijn soms erg lastig te lezen.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews